


Trigger

by hellkitty



Category: RoboCop - All Media Types
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-30
Updated: 2014-03-30
Packaged: 2018-01-17 15:15:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1392406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I think every fanfic writer has that secret little giggly thought in the back of their mind that someone involved in canon will find and read and love their stuff.<br/>And then I go and write something like this. *headdesk*  So, here's me, doing the metaphoric version of pulling a hoodie hood up over my head and cinching the cords down so only my nose shows. Y....yeah, I'm going to be comfortable in my obscurity, kthx. </p>
<p>I don't even know how to tag/warn for this one, folks.  Google Rafe Biggs and we'll just, ya know, leave it at that.  Nothing explicit, just weird. And actually semi-plausible. It's squatting somewhere on that line between unsettling and cracky, because I can't be the only person who uses lols as a coping mechanism. Deliberate, if abrupt, fade to black.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trigger

“Where’s Dr Norton?” Alex realized, too late, like the second the words left his mouth, that it was probably kind of rude.

“He has some personal business,” Kim said, not even looking up from where she was setting up the tools to do his basic maintenance. “He’ll be back tomorrow.”

“Hey. I didn’t mean, you know—“

She smiled over at him. “I know. It’s routine and no one likes routine to be disrupted.”

Alex frowned. “Making me sound like an old man.” He used to be plenty spontaneous. What had happened? Was it some kind of side effect of all the programming?

“That’s just Dennett rubbing off on you. He does that to everyone.” The smile took on a little more light, a little more sincerity. “This is pretty routine, though. Time to check hand calibration.”

They broke his maintenance into a segmented schedule, every day, a new part. It was for efficiency, or something, minimizing downtime. He stretched out his left hand, turning it palm up, as she bent over it with a microsprayer. “Any deficiencies noted?”

He shook his head, forgetting for an instant that she couldn’t see it. “None showing up, no.”

“Good.” She placed a device in his hand. It looked like a high tech version of the thing Jack had in his desk drawer to strengthen his fingers for rock climbing. He remembered—vaguely, as so many of his memories from what he’d started to think of as his prior life, like looking at it through a cloudy window—teasing Jack about taking up such a hipster hobby. Until Jack had taken him and he’d spent the next two days feeling muscles he’d never knew he had sending him constant hate mail. “All right,” Kim said. “Let’s start with, say, fifty percent output.”

It was still a change, to think about his grip, his strength, any of his abilities, in terms of math, percentages, angles, vectors of force. Before, if someone had told him to squeeze with half his strength, he’d have interpreted it to mean ‘pretty hard but don’t break anything’. Now, he simply rolled the output up to 50, precisely.

She took a reading. “All right, let’s top it out.”

Full output. Again, he felt almost nothing, just a reading on a scale. “How much is that?”

“You could crush a car,” she said. “We had to top out at something that wouldn’t actually damage the hand itself, though.” She seemed unfazed, bending over his hand, the one she’d just told him could maul metal, plucking the device from his palm. “Now do this.” She held her own hand up, executing a series of dexterity movements, touching each finger to the pad of the thumb in a fast sequence. It was easier to follow than it looked, his programming capturing the series and replicating it flawlessly. “Very good.”

“What does that test, anyway?” Since it was just he and Kim, he figured, maybe he could ask some questions that he’d never felt comfortable asking Norton.

“Basic dexterity, visual acuity and motor replication, and of course, that the signal is getting through clearly. Some humans can’t do that sequence without practice.” She tilted her head, black hair skimming her shoulders. “I needed to practice. Dennett didn’t, but he blames it on his mother making him take piano lessons as a kid.”

Alex could almost see it: a smaller Dennett Norton, probably in a polo shirt buttoned all the way up to the neck, sitting in front of a battered upright, the whole image tinted with that sepia tone, like a faded Polaroid.

Kim scooted around to the other side. He always felt weird in these moments, the way they moved around him like he was a thing, a big piece of furniture. Big, heavily armored furniture, that could crush a car with one hand. It took some getting used to, at least from his side of it. 

She looked up at him. “Can I ask you a question? You don’t have to answer it, though.” Huh. It seemed he wasn’t the only one climbing on the ‘Dr Norton isn’t here/cat's away’ train.

“Sure.”

“What does it feel like? I mean, the body.”

He didn’t answer for a long moment. Not because he was upset at the question, but because he had to think about it. “I can’t…really feel it. I mean, I can do things automatically like know how to walk, how high to reach to get something but it’s…I can’t tell if it’s me or the system.”

“The balance feedback,” she said.

He nodded. “It’s like, I don’t know. You know when you drive a car for a long time and it’s like you know where its bumper is without looking when you turn, how hard to cut the wheel, but it's not like you feel them.” Like that. He remembered feeling his body, before, a strange dual disconnect, floating over it, in it, when he’d first woken up. “I used to feel it.”

“Neural plasticity, probably.” She toyed with the device, changing the settings before holding it out to his human hand. “The brain often rewires itself after trauma, making up for new gaps.”

New gaps. Like missing 90% of a body.  Seemed like more than a 'gap' to Alex. “Like how blind people get better hearing or something?” He’d read about that, somewhere. 

“Like that, yes.” She nodded at him to squeeze. “The brain takes inventory of what’s left, and gets to work rebuilding old connections, building new ones to compensate.”

“I’ve got a lot to compensate for.”

“So it takes time,” she said. “Good, now give me about 50.” He lessened the force, guessing, but it seemed close enough. “And now the part you hate.” She took the device from his palm, picking up what looked like a dental tool. “Tactile sensitivity.”

She was right: he did hate it: she, or Norton, had to peck along each finger with the device, hard enough to sting. He’d protested, but Norton had explained that it was to make sure the hand was still ‘viable’. He hadn’t wanted to ask what would happen if it wasn’t, so he’d meekly continued to lay out his hand for the poking process, and just hoped for the best. At one level, losing his hand would be just yet another thing lost among so many. But on another…it was the only hand he could feel with, the only hand that registered anything beyond pressure. He nodded, turning the palm up as she tugged over the small light on a stand, flicking it on. It cast a grid of red dots over his hand, little points for her to test and mark.

It wasn’t miserable, but it was hardly pleasant, like having your gums cleaned, something you just tried to pretend you were somewhere else while it was happening. She was faster than Norton, though, tapping the probe along the gridded lines, without asking him about fifty times how it felt. Alex had long run out of interesting ways to say ‘it sucks’.

“Good?”

“Everything’s A-Ok.” She reached over to the table, picking up a bottle. “Now, to make up for that.”

Alex tilted his head, looking at it. It looked like…hand lotion? Smelled like it, too, that sort of frilly fruity herbal scent he always associated with Clara’s side of the bathroom cabinet.

She rubbed the lotion between her palms, warming it up, before reaching for his hand. “I swear, you make one Korean nail salon joke, and I will end you.”

“Furthest thing from my mind.” Really, it was. He and Jack had made all sorts of inappropriate jokes to each other, but that was, well, a guy thing, maybe. Besides, he was still weirded out by the idea that she was doing this at all.

Her hands felt good against his, warm and stronger than he would have imagined, the smaller fingers kneading into the skin and muscle of his hand, the padding of his thumb, the webbing between his fingers. It felt…really good, honestly, and he felt his breath respond, deepening, relaxing after the tension of the constant prodding. It felt good just to feel again, and the question she’d asked earlier, about how much of his body he could feel, maybe that was making him think about it, making him more aware of his ability to feel: pressure, heat, the not-quite-slickness of the lotion, the firm fingers, even the little hard crescents of her fingernails. Feeling was…really fucking wonderful, honestly, and he felt kind of stupid for not having appreciated it as much as he should have—could have—when he’d had it.

She turned his hand over, rubbing the back, tracing her thumbs down the lines of the tendons of his fingers, pulling off each finger. And it went, somehow, from feeling really good to feeling….

“You all right?” She looked up.

“Yeah. Fine.” Even he didn’t believe his voice. “It’s just…it feels, uh.” Yeah, he wasn’t sure he could explain this to an old guy like Norton, much less a pretty woman like Kim. “…weird.”

“Weird good or weird bad?” Oh Christ, the way her eyebrows knitted she had no idea.

“Good. Just. You know. Not. Uh. Appropriate.” Wow, that was probably the weakest word he could ever have come up with.

Her mouth opened in a startled shape, her hands stopping their movement on his, before she burst out laughing, one hand moving to cover her mouth, the kind of laugh that was mostly embarrassment. He felt plenty of embarrassment, but yeah, it wasn’t funny. Yet. In a few weeks maybe. Just not right now, with his whole body--because it felt like his body again, just like it had when he'd first woken up in China--tingling and aroused, spinal actuators shifting almost restlessly against the molded lucite. 

"Well," she said, finally, "You can still blush."

"Great. Look, I...."

"It's neuroplasticity," she said, and her voice had taken on the excited edge of a scientist again. "Like we were talking about. Your brain is compensating for missing parts."

"Not that part! On my hand?" Seriously. 

"Well, it makes sense. I mean, the same shape, basically." She looked down at his hand, running a curious fingernail down the back of his index finger.   "It's actually pretty fascinating."

His breath caught and now that he'd made the connection, yeah, it was...just about the same feeling. Only it wasn't Clara touching him.  Was this cheating?  Christ, was he going to have to start wearing gloves? His whole hand felt naked and vulgar, his thoughts having a hard time coming together in the slow boil of arousal. "Easy for you to say. It's not your hand!"

"I wonder," she said, studying his hand, turning it over. "I wonder how thoroughly it's rewired."  

"Thoroughly."  Oh god, she couldn't be thinking what he thought she was thinking. But then, what else could it be?  "Look. I mean, I'm married." Married and horny as fuck right now and she'd already been touching him and.... "Look. This has happened before, right? One of your other patients?" 

"Nothing like this, no. We've never had such an extreme prosthetic replacement." She looked up, positively glowing, and somehow--maybe it was a doctor thing--entirely oblivious to the whole awkwardness of the thing. Which made it even more awkward, somehow. "Dr Norton will be excited."

"Thanks for that mental image."  Just when he thought this couldn't get any worse in his head. His brain literally balked at sketching out that meeting. Because Norton would probably be just as fascinated as he was and the only thing wronger than a pretty woman touching his, yeah, whatever, would be Norton.  Especially not anywhere near the term 'excited'.  He flexed his hand, loosened it, running through some of the dexterity drills they made him learn. It didn't lessen the insistent throb in the back of his brain, the awareness of his body, like a ghost's, over the metal. 

She rested a hand, high up on his wrist. "It's good news, though, Alex.  It's always a positive when the body asserts sexual functioning."

'Asserts sexual functioning'. Right. She was talking about his hand. God, there were so many teenage hairy palm jokes crowding his head he could barely think straight.

"If it would help, I could call your wife?" On the plus column: Kim being aware that touching a married guy's junk was maybe a little inappropriate.  On the minus column: Kim explaining this to Clara.

"No, no. Jesus. She's still, you know, adjusting to...the rest of it." Hi, I'm Alex and let's maybe not shake hands. It's like his brain had set him up for the weirdest fucking prank ever in the history of neural plastic...whatever. Why his hand? Why not...okay, on second thought, maybe there weren't a lot of other options. But still.   

"You have to be curious, aren't you?" Kim said.  Because obviously she was. "I mean, how far it can go? And we have to find out somehow."  

Was she seriously suggesting...yeah, she probably was.  And part of him--his brain, which was a giant fucking troll--and his libido were perfectly fine with the idea, and he could feel a throb that had nothing to do with the pulse he no longer had through his body, surging toward his fingers.  

"Only if I get to make an Asian massage parlor joke." Because fair's fair. Or something. 

She laughed, tossing her hair back over her shoulder, rubbing her palms together to warm them before reaching for his hand again, stroking down, then up, the fingers. "Brave talk, considering what I've got in my hands."


End file.
